What Is RescueTime?

RescueTime is a time management &amp; Productivity software company founded in 2008. The RescueTime app runs in the background of your devices tracking, measuring and categorizing your own activity.

RescueTime is a free program with a premium upgrade That allows more specific reporting and features like moment input. It offers a reporting dashboard with your data diced, chopped and sorted into charts that will assist you manage your own time.

The app is based on Peter Drucker’s (the famous Management advisor ) maxim that”what gets measured, gets managed.”

RescueTime requires the monitoring of time So that you actually track your own time so that and makes it automatic and painless you may be aware of time use.

That said, there are dozens and dozens of Productivity &amp; time management tools on the Internet. What are the pros &amp; cons of RescueTime? Here’s what I have noticed through the years.

Disclosure — I receive referral fees from firms Mentioned on this website. Any info or opinions are all based on my experience as a paying customer or consultant to a client. App To Track How You Spend Your Time

Rescuing Your Period

To reiterate, RescumeTime is a productivity tool at the Feel that it helps your abilities improve. It collects data about the programs and websites you use, then generates reports based on that info.

To Begin, you create an account and set up a Desktop app on your own computer(s) and a mobile app on Android devices. There’s no iOS app because the operating system prevents RescueTime from collecting the data it needs to perform its purpose. Those programs quietly and invisibly track which programs you use and which sites you visit, in addition to the amount of time you spend on them.

The tough nut to crack is how to make sense of all that information. To get the best results, you have to customize your account from the RescueTime website and inform the app more about what you consider productive versus unproductive activity. The further you fine-tune it to your specific conditions, the greater your results. As an instance, somebody who operates in the financing industry might classify reading financial news on web sites such as MarketWatch and FT.com as a productivity job, whereas for me, that’s an unproductive use of time.

You can categorize website and each app on a 5-point Scale of very effective, effective, impartial, dependable, and incredibly unproductive. You can even categorize action into perform categorizes. By way of instance, I record Google Docs as quite productive, and that I categorized it as Writing, and it will be a subcategory of Design and Composition. Looking at Redfin.com is quite distracting when I’m trying to work, and I have categorized it as such.

From the desktop app, there’s a simple set of controllers That lets you pause RescueTime for 15 minutes, 1 hour, or until tomorrow, giving you easy access to switching the app off for days or breaks once you wrap up early.

Privacy

When faced with RescueTime’s proposition–We will monitor Everything you do and provide you insights about your customs! –some people might, justifiably, be worried about their privacy and the security of information on their hardware. If you use sensitive information online or store sensitive information on your computers and mobile devices, you are going to want to read RescueTime’s privacy and safety statements carefully.

For everyone RescueTime’s privacy policy Includes a summary on top, just a few condensed lines that are worth reading.

If your worries are more relaxed and you simply don’t Want RescueTime monitoring you on the weekend, you have control over the times and days the program monitors your behaviour. You can easily set it to only watch your action from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, or whatever schedule suits you.

Reports

I have used RescueTime for decades, and that I do not check my Productivity reports. I love to allow the service run in the background so that when I do want to get a better image of how I’ve been spending my time, a good amount of information is waiting for me.

When I do go through the reports, however, they are Magnificent. I love the variety, providing you get multiple methods of understanding your productivity and habits, from bar graphs and pie charts that reveal lump sums of activity, to line things of applications you employed.

One simple but powerful piece of advice RescueTime Provides is an analysis of when during the day you tend to be the most successful. I wasn’t surprised to observe that my brain peaks in the morning and slacks off after 2:00 p.m., as that matches pretty well with what I know about my customs. If you have never analyzed your productivity, however, that may be a useful revelation for you, one that may help you schedule your days more productively.

The longer you use RescueTime Premium, the more applicable the Data becomes, because you may see your data by day, week, month, or year. And as you might expect, it is possible to toggle that times and days RescueTime records your action so that it works automatically on weekends, for example. App To Track How You Spend Your Time

Additional Capabilities

Much of the value you get from RescueTime comes in what You make of the data and how you use that data to affect your own behavior. Changing behavior is tough, but getting rich insights does not have to be.

One of the manners RescueTime makes it easy to understand how To interpret all the information it collects is with a Productivity Pulse score. This daily score, shown as a percentage, comes from calculating the percentage of time spent very productive, productive, impartial, unproductive, and incredibly wasteful jobs. To be clear, nobody is advocating you target for a 100 percent Productivity Pulse score.

A RescueTime blog post describing the productivity Score notes that the average score is 67 percent, and the average is 79 percent. The majority of people need to do some job which isn’t considered”very productive” throughout their day. The whole purpose of using RescueTime will be to help you work out how to focus on productive and very productive tasks when you will need to and possibly save productive tasks for times when your ability to concentrate was waning anyway.

Productive jobs are not the Exact Same thing as distractions. RescueTime has a straightforward and smart feature for controlling behavior that is unwanted, such as getting sucked into distracting websites. A feature called FocusTime, when empowered, blocks your ability to access. It requires a little setting up and personalization, but it’s quite powerful, once it is ready to deploy. As an example, let us say you wish to finish a record, and to make progress on it, you need to concentrate hardcore for at least the next 30 minutes. It can block you from taking a look posting on Twitter, checking sports scores, or whatever other sites and activities, and switch on FocusTime you deem distracting.

The RescueTime mobile app has a setting that will Mechanically silence your phone when you empower FocusTime. Likewise, you may set up other automation with the help of third-party providers IFTTTFree in iTunes Store and Zapier to obstruct or silence other distractions. By way of example, you may make a rule using IFTTT (it stands for”if this, then that”) that says,”When I enable FocusTime, then automatically set my Slack status to busy.”

RescueTime also gives you the Choice Idle moment. Any time RescueTime finds that the computer was idle for several minutes at a row, so it pops up a dialogue asking if you were at a meeting, on the phone, taking rest, etc, and permits you to categorize the idle time accordingly.

Advantages of RescueTime

Here is some of the advantages of utilizing RescueTime Over solutions. App To Track How You Spend Your Time

Feature Set

At its heart, RescueTime does something — monitor time. It’s not super special, if you look at it that way. Technically, you could do this using a spreadsheet or any of the dozens of programs that are free on the internet.

However, RescueTime’s feature set The way that it tracks time and exactly what it does with the information (aka, one you’ll actually use).

RescueTime watches which windows have Activity, looks at times, and the window title the action in this window. It is constantly running in the background always watching.

Unobtrustive, 100 tracking makes RescueTime worthwhile. There is no friction or barrier to monitoring time.

Since RescueTime’s monitoring feature simplifies that Problem, you will have data that’s complete, correct & useful.

RescueTime’s other features focus on making their Core feature better. Like time-tracking &amp; billing for 15, they don’t try to add. They do not try to enter any side businesses.

They do have Attribute in an interesting manner. The Get Focused! Feature blocks apps.

They have goals and alarms that Permit You to pick What you want to happen when X happens — and RescueTime can do this based on which it is tracking.

I love RescueTime does Offline Time Tracking. Rather than having to search and put in it in 100% manually, then you select a time interval that is unlogged and fill in the blank.

You can customize the buttons to create logging Offline time easy and quick.

It is a minimalist feature set — but that’s exactly What makes it great. It’s simple, easy and well-done.

Pricing and Plans

RescueTime offers two tiers of service: Lite (free) and Premium ($9 per month or $72 per year). Businesses or organizations that want to utilize RescueTime across a bunch of individuals pay the same speed as Premium subscribers.

RescueTime Lite offers Tracked her or his time. The app monitors which sites and applications you use, and how much time you spend in or on every one of these. You can categorize each program and website you use on a Productive/Unproductive scale, also RescueTime generates a couple of primary reports demonstrating the best way to spend your time. Lite members can place weekly goals, such as”spend X hours per week on productive jobs and fewer than Y moments on faulty items.” It’s possible to find a weekly report email to you. For reports, you are limited to a history, nevertheless.

Subscribers get everything from the free Lite plan, Plus extra features and reports, such as an report history. Premium comes with alarms you can empower for when you hit daily goals. You can more accurately log time spent away from the computer, noting if you’re in a meeting, on a phone call, or simply out to lunch. There is a Get Focused option, which permits you to block deflecting websites for a time period you set. App To Track How You Spend Your Time

Comparing RescueTime’s cost to that of other apps Needs an open mind as few apps do precisely what RescueTime does. Qbserve is one and it costs a level one-time fee of $40.

We could, but look at traditional time-tracking Apps for freelancers that typically contain tools for generating invoices. HarvestFree at Harvest is a example. At $12 per individual per month for Premium, it costs over RescueTime, but it’s a very clear return on investment because it helps to ensure more accurate charging. How you will translate RescueTime’s reports and make better use of your time as a consequence is much less clear.

Toggl, another traditional app that is Popular among salespeople, prices $9 per month, and it also gives you clear tools for tracking time spent on projects with the end aim of charging clients. Toggl doesn’t contain its own invoicing tools, but it has integration options for linking with invoicing services.

A few programs are closer to RescueTime in what they have to Provide, such as Slife, even though they have a tendency to have fewer attributes even if they are free (and Slife is).

Either way — RescueTime is a no-brainer pricing-wise. It’s free to use.

And when the reporting/advanced attributes save you only 1 hour each month then it is paid for itself even if you are simply making US minimum wage.

RescueTime is.

Program Quality

A Frequent problem with monitoring apps of all types is That they have to be on. The”always on” attribute can cause performance issues on notebooks &amp; desktop computers. It can induce battery issues on mobile devices.

But in my own experience, RescueTime induces neither. It’s running from startup on my Macbook Pro, my Windows PC, along with also my Nexus 5x mobile phone. I have never monitored any battery or performance problems to the program.

It is well-built and lightweight.

I enjoy the fact that the mobile app doesn’t demand Dozens of permissions that are ridiculous. It demands access to usage data, but doesn’t attempt to track contacts location, emails, or any of the privacy violating permissions other programs ask for.

It is quick to set up and syncs using an internet dashboard. It crunches the information if you are on the Premium program or by next day to the free program, and pulls at precisely the exact same period.

Reporting

What is the purpose of data if you can’t interpret it Or put it to use? App To Track How You Spend Your Time

RescueTime’s reports solves that problem — and in Many ways is the purpose of working with the program.

RescueTime’s Dashboard uses bar and Pie charts to show exactly what you are (and aren’t ) doing.

You can Choose to receive reports Daily, Week or month.

And on Top of That, you can dig deep to the Reporting with various filters and overlays to find out your habits.

It is really eye-opening to determine the amount of Time that each job happens.

When I working for a marketing agency in Atlanta — The time tracked to Instant Messages and Gchats was astounding. It changed processes not only for me personally, but also my project managers.

Now that I’m on my own with no fulltime employees — I will see the precise time that I devote to jobs that matter. I can build my day .

And just to reiterate — all the reports are Built-in into the software. The Dashboard is on my default — as well as reports are pre-built.

It’s all seamless fast and effective so that you While assessing your time are wasting time.

Integrations

One of the key selling points of RescueTime is their characteristic set minimalism. They do one thing and they do it nicely.

That said people using their merchandise Have software requirements that are time-based. Whether it’s project management, charging, staff time tracking or something your time needs don’t cease with measuring, tracking and categorization.

To resolve that Issue, RescueTime’s applications Integrates with a huge range. They’ve direct integrations and an API with software.

Whether you are a freelancer attempting to integrate Time tracking into a project manager that must collate team member’s time or invoicing software like FreshBooks, RescueTime will integrate with it.

Cons of RescueTime

Like any applications RescueTime is Perfect nor can it be the ideal fit for everybody. Here is some pitfalls that I’ve noticed over the years. App To Track How You Spend Your Time

Effectiveness vs. Efficiency

If you do the wrong thing for 18 hours Every Day, Daily with perfect focus — you are doing the wrong thing.

The most important factor in time management is to Work on the things that are ideal — the 20 percent of time input which will generate 80% of your results.

And that’s a factor that is 100% on you personally. RescueTime Can not fix that issue.

Actually, in some ways, RescueTime can damage your By pushing you towards doing over research strategy and planning efforts.

If efficacy is your core issue, then RescueTime isn’t for you. It’ll only make things worse.

I’d recommend reading a few of them books.

Summary

RescueTime continues to be an invaluable tool for me personally. It is not for everybody and has some attribute quirks and disadvantages.

Nevertheless, the best thing it is provided is perspective. It’s easy to think that you just”work a ton” or are”not hooked on a telephone” or”invest as much time writing” or are”barely ever on Facebook.”

However, the information does not lie. And using RescueTime to Get precise time data on your time can help your time is literally rescued by you and place your own life in perspective. App To Track How You Spend Your Time